Slattsnews

You can’t libel the dead, Paul Sheehan knows that. But you can put the record straight. And boy, does Sheehan put it straight about bent dead lawyer John Marsden:

Of all the lawyers who should shut up about bringing “disgrace to our profession” it was Marsden. Given the sanitising, laudatory comments made in recent days by the Premier, Morris Iemma, the president of the NSW Law Society, June McPhie, and the head of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, portraying Marsden as a civic hero, let the record show that Marsden was a serial liar, a proven perjurer, a flagrant illegal drug-user and drug provider, a professional who had sex with his own clients, a wealthy man who boasted about sodomising young men he picked up on the streets, a standover man who was vexatious and constantly at war, a bully who used the law as a weapon.
Marsden lived with blood on his hands. He died with a guilty conscience. This might or might not explain his rage when a Crown prosecutor said defence lawyers could be sleazy. It was Marsden who got Ivan Milat off a rape charge in the 1970s, using the legal system’s medieval treatment of rape victims to leave Milat free to resume his favoured pastime. At least seven people would die before Milat was finally caught.

Read every illuminating word.

Right place to be for a smack in the mouth:
Czech Health Minister David Rath has been in a punch-up with his right-wing rival, Miroslav Macek, during a meeting of disgruntled dentists in Prague.
Mr Macek, a presidential adviser and former deputy PM who is also a dentist, broke off an address to slap Mr Rath hard on the back of the head.
Mr Rath responded by calling him a coward and the two men traded blows.